Christmas. Adam C. English
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today we might call pagan, way of thinking. He wouldn’t have called himself a pagan—the word didn’t yet exist. He would have said he was simply upholding traditional belief and giving intellectual clarity to cherished values. Traditional Roman and Greek belief recognized many deities and spirits but always deferred to the one high god who presided over all. The highest god was not scatterbrained and disorganized like us. He was, according to Albinus, flawless in morals and perfectly rational in mind. Albinus argued that prior to the birth of the heavens, matter moved about “chaotically and discordantly” but the highest god “brought it from disorder into the most perfect order, arranging its parts with numbers and shapes that were fitting.”19 As Albinus knew, this was the kind of divinity that people could get behind.
Amazingly, John’s gospel moves in precisely the opposite direction of his philosophical contemporaries like Albinus of Smyrna. Indeed, according to John the highest deity did something completely unexpected. The divine will that revealed itself initially in the darkness before time, organizing and systematizing the universe, threw in its lot with humanity. Banging through the door like an uninvited and very rowdy party guest, the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.
Chaos. Good news.
Human nature itches to rein in, classify, harness, tame, command, order, control. Divine nature disrupts, discombobulates, and disperses. It trumpets a new song, notches the base of the tree with an ax and then starts swinging, splitting mother from daughter and son from father (Ps 40:3; Matt 3:10; Luke 12:52–3; Mal 4:1). The world tilts toward institutionalism, toward bureaucracy, toward paper work and filing cabinets. Such a slant favors law and order, yes, but also the banality of evil that attends it—the systematizing of advantage and disadvantage, privilege and oppression. The gift of the Word unbalances the equation and so fulfills Isaiah’s prophecy of the Christ (Isa 61:1–2; Luke 4:18–9). For the prophecy heralds an anointed one who releases captives and unbounds prisoners, one who unspins the powers and horns the year of the Lord’s favor.20
Christianity is, in the words of Cambridge theologian John Milbank, “the religion of the obliteration of boundaries.”21 By this he means to highlight the importance of the enfleshment of the Word in Jesus Christ. For Milbank, the incarnation becomes the high-water mark of history, the grand moment in the grand narrative of God’s work. “With the doctrine of the Incarnation, Christianity violates the boundary between created and creator, immanence and transcendence, humanity and God. In this way, the arch taboo grounding all the others is broken.”22 The incarnation crosses the threshold separating creator and created, God and humanity. There is for humans a way to God because God made it. God snapped the taboo, God violated the boundary, God in Christ reached through the impenetrable curtain and rescued us.
And not only that. The Christian message places in our hands the dynamite to explode the limits “between nations, between races, between the sexes, between the household and the city, between ritual purity and impurity, between work and leisure, between days of the week, between sign and reality (in the Sacraments), between the end of time and living in time, and even between culture and nature.”23 The power of the incarnation breaks barriers and reduces walls of division to rubble. In Christ there can be found neither male nor female, slave nor free, Greek nor Jew (Gal 3:28). They dissolve, grow pale, disappear, sputter out. They are of no consequence. In the dazzling light of Christ the King of kings and Lord of lords, all other distinctions between individual persons fade to insignificance. If we have faith that the advent of Christ has flattened all obstacles between us and God, how much more has it done so between us and our fellow human beings?
But oh! How even the rubble of a wall can have the effect of a real wall in keeping us apart.
Why Flesh?
The Word stitched flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The Word did not simply go into Jesus or hover over his head; the Word became Jesus, born of Mary. It didn’t have to be that way. It could have been otherwise. What entered the gray haze of the world could have taken the form of law or ordinance or thunderbolt. But instead what came was word, spoken logos—fleeting, uncatchable, unpredictable. It was nothing more or less than speech for those who have ears to listen. Pencil pushers and keyboard fingers put the spoken word on the record, reproducing every jot and tittle so that not one letter or one stroke of a letter passes. But writing offers at best a substitute, a transcript representation of speech—not speech itself. Speech happens in the moment. The moment is unrepeatable. Even when captured on video and audio, what has been caught is no longer a live speech but the archival record of a live speech. “You have heard that it was said to those of long ago . . . . But I say to you . . .” (Matt 5:21–22). In Jesus we encounter the unrepeatable Moment, the eternal Now, the persistent and insistent voice that counters every fixed law and written record—“But I say to you.” Such a voice cannot be snatched, penned, or engraved in stone; it can only be heard and obeyed. And for this reason the religion known as Christianity is really nothing more than a long string of calls and responses.
But why? Why did the Word become flesh?
Just Believe
In my favorite scene from the 2003 family classic, Elf, Will Ferrell as Buddy the Elf tilts back his head and inhales a two-liter bottle of soda, lets out a thirty-second belch, and then exclaims at the dinner table, “Did you hear that?!” Aside from such lowbrow antics, Elf relates Buddy’s Odyssean quest to find his father and his true home. In part, the plot involves the world’s depleting supply of Christmas spirit. The depletion causes troubles for Santa Claus because his sleigh’s ability to fly is powered by the spirit of belief. Thankfully, the remedy is simple. The way to reenergize the Christmas spirit and spread Christmas cheer, as it turns out, is to sing loudly for all to hear.
The crisis of Christmas magic serves as a plot device for many holiday movies. In the Tim Allen series of The Santa Claus movies (1994, 2002, 2006), the magic of Santa Claus comes and goes, transfers from one individual to another, and can be lost if certain contractual obligations are not met. It is always in precious supply and in peril of disappearing. In Rise of the Guardians (2012), North, Tooth, Jack Frost, Bunny, and other muscle-bound, tattooed, and ninja-trained holiday sprites must protect the innocent imagination and belief of children. More than bearers of glad tidings and gifts, these characters identify themselves as “guardians” who protect the magic of childhood belief. From what? From any and all threats to that magic and those beliefs. Grown-ups will surely groan at Rise of the Guardians’ far-fetched nonsense, but the take-away message of the film is really no different than The Santa Claus, Elf, or the 1947 classic Miracle on 34th Street. In these and other shows, the protagonists desperately need to believe, or to get other people to believe. Believe in what? In the case of The Polar Express (2004), “Santa Claus.” In the case of the many film adaptations of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, “generosity.” Sometimes the main characters and the audience are asked to believe in kindness, other times in love, or imagination, or hope. What is important, though, is to believe. Holiday stores have noticed the trend and so sell ornaments, wall hangings, and other trinkets with the phrase “just believe” written in festively slanted cursive.
Of course, the very imperative to believe is itself an admission of defeat. People who carry on lives according to richly interlaced beliefs and convictions need not be cajoled on a daily basis to believe. Their very livelihoods, habits, activities, and conversations enact and display their beliefs. We might call these people religious, but it might be more accurate to call them convictional. In the absence of convictions, the Hollywood entertainment industry has stepped in, filled the void, and saturated the market with tales of belief that appeal especially to those who want so badly for their innocent childhood fairy tales to be true and for the world to be infused with a primitive magic. Denizens of modernity yearn for a purpose and a reality above and beyond the give-and-take, buy-and-sell, build-and-lose monotony of urban life. They want to believe . . . in what? It hardly matters. Just believe.